January 28 - Jamie Reid

Jamie Reid was born in Timmins, Ontario in 1941. He first encountered poetry on his mother’s knee, where she would recite from memory The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Cremation of Sam McGee. At the University of British Columbia, Reid met Warren Tallman and together with George Bowering, Fred Wah and several other writers founded TISH in 1961; they would later become collectively known as the Tish poets.

In the latter half of the 1960s, Reid organized Vancouver’s first Be-In, a gathering of activists following the example of a similar event in San Francisco. In 1967 he withdrew to the countryside of the Okanagan, where he wrote his first book of poems, The Man Whose Path Was on Fire (1969), which took the Canadian literary scene by storm. Reid then travelled to central Canada and, in his words, “became a fierce communist for almost twenty years,” which landed him numerous visits to prison, allegedly for assaulting police officers. For the last four or five years he has been indulging his taste for Dadaism and literary anarchism by publishing a well-respected magazine of local and international avant garde writing called DaDaBaBy, through which Reid continues to do his part in disrupting and challenging contemporary economic and political structures. Reid’s poetic work is fiercely intelligent, fearlessly incisive, and always politically charged.

Jamie will be reading at the Pooka Press book launch on January 22.
Book launch details:


THURSDAY January 22nd
7PM - 9PM

come for the Launch of Cath Morris' VENUS & APOLLO
& get a signed copy
for only $5

George Stanley on VENUS & APOLLO

"Cath Morris's poems are dramatic, elegiac visions of the deeper implications of what we are doing as humans: the loss of personhood to technology, the fate of innocent beings before reason and power."

Launch w/ Jamie Reid launching homages

Thursday January 22
cafe Montmartre
4362 Main Street